As promised yesterday, Speedy, as usual, needlessly ejaculates Green Arrow from the Arrowcar with the catapult, hoping that Ollie either goes through an open window or remembered to update his will.
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| Green Arrow isn't Batman. He doesn't skulk in shadowy corners and sidle up behind you to spook you, he bursts into your open window in bright colors saying "HERE I AM!" Batman and Green Arrow are like the Vega Brothers in Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981). |
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| No joke: that's great Golden Art composition there, viewed from just over Ollie's left shoulder. |
Naturally, Green Arrow is oblivious to the fact that's a guy in a devil costume lurking on the ledge preparing to shoot him. Fortunately, the Boy Backup is there to save his bacon, as usual.
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| Seriously: Golden Age artists really knew how to compose. Those panels are brilliantly parallel AND opposing. |
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| "That Nervy Kid." See? Ollie can't remember his name, either. |
While Ollie ponders how to make the most dramatic entrance possible, That Nevry Kid finds the Red Devils and starts beating the snot out of them single-handedly.
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| Speedy is the best sidekick ever. He's DOPE. So to speak. |
Ollie makes his dramatic entrance, narrowly avoiding landing face-first on the hood of his comedically large yellow car:
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| "I'll park the Bananamobile under this tree, where no one will notice it." |
The Red Devils retreat up the rollercoaster rather than get a growly lecture from Ollie about how they have failed this amusement park. So Ollie does, as usual, the least sensible thing imaginable.
Gonna give you a second to imagine what it is.
Ready?
Okay:
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| Ollie, you DO know that the rollercoaster cars come BACK to where they started, right? |
Green Arrow DRIVES the Arrowcar, America's largest personal conveyance, UP THE ROLLERCOASTER.
What could possibly go wrong?
TOMORROW: What goes wrong.
Nobody has Zorro, the Gay Blade streaming!? I remember thinking that was the funniest thing I had seen, as a kid, and I'm actually curious whether (given that the world is a bit more accepting, now) it's actually funny or the sort of movie best left buried in the Californian desert.
ReplyDeleteBut that caption does bring up an interesting question (besides why Disney+ hates Zorro when Walt tried and failed a few times to find a competitor) of how Green Arrow was able to cling to life as a C-lister for forty years with nothing to recommend him but the constant passive-aggressive snarking at poor Roy (whose name "Speedy," remember, comes from the fact that Roy is faster on the draw and a better shot than Ollie!), when vastly superior discount-Batman (from a former competitor) Dr. Mid-Nite is sitting right there with nothing to do, in a costume with Robin's (and the...uhm, Bolt Brothers'?) color scheme. And he's smart enough not to get a sidekick willing to upstage him like the Terrific Whatzit getting groped by the most aggressive string quartet I've ever seen.
You're right about the art. This is almost shockingly competent for a strip that definitely doesn't deserve it. Except...hang on, the caption to the second-to-last panel. Ollie isn't tooling around in the Arrowcar. It's the Arrowplane that he's taking on tracks where he's presumably going to go to fast and fall to his death without ever realizing that planes can fly. It explains why it's the size of a private jet, though. Half of it's probably the "crime lab," which I assume is what Ollie calls his bar.
Zorro the Gay Blade is on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteWait. Speedy catapults GA through the open window to confront ... someone he needs to talk to? So GA uses a highly dangerous, improbably effective personal catapult to ... take a meeting? Did the building not have an elevator and Ollie just wasn't into cardio that day? I'm just going to set aside the invention of the telephone for now.
ReplyDeleteI mean, I get the shock and awe value of having a six-foot version of one of Santa's elves explode through your window if you're a CROOK. And the crooks will have guns and whatnot ready to hand, so surprise is absolutely essential if you've only got a bow and arrows on your side, and you told the actual archery expert to park the car. But this is an innocent victim.
Forget spattering yourself on a wall. Suppose you gave the poor frightened bastard a heart attack, Ollie? You'd be doing the Red Devils' work FOR them.
Ollie is a drama queen. All of his entrances have to be like Dolly Levi returning to the Harmonia Gardens.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, an initial glance -- which took in only Daphne's orange hair and the words "Red Devils" -- very briefly had me thinking Saturday's feature would about Archie, whom IIRC you hate even more passionately than you hate Green Arrow and who has of course appeared in at least twenty times as many stories as Green Arrow has. Another time, perhaps. ;-)
ReplyDelete